Breathe deeply

Not the most productive of days. No. Had better. Several drinks required.

Mrs QO and our currently resident police officer having left the premises for the day, I settled down to my important work. High on the 'to do' list was to telephone the number that Nurse Desirée had given me. I dialled eagerly, noting in a separate portion of my multi-tasking brain that it was about time we had a new word for 'dialling', since we manifestly don't any more.

Connection.

"Hello, you're through to Dorks Anonymous. Press 1 for your local dorks group. Press 2 to hear the 12-step program that enables you to leave dorkdom behind. Press 3..."

I feel that the bitter depths of my disappointment and mortification may well be imagined, and thus left unrecorded here.

However, my spirits were soon restored by my elevenses (75ml of gin and 25ml of dry vermouth, plus today's tablets of course) and I turned to the other major project of the day - the setting up of a new laptop, recently delivered from those nice people that work for Mr Dell.

Welcome to Windows 7. Oh, brave new world, and let's hope fervently it doesn't suck as much as Vista. No, it doesn't, but it does have some funny ideas. Chief among these is its preference for only networking with other Win 7 machines. Given that there aren't that many of them out there, relatively speaking, this seems a little 'stand-offish', as we might say. Anyone who's tinkered with home networks will be expecting a little grief every time a new machine is added, but this really was harder than it need have been.

Win 7 pc: "No, what you want is for me to start a Homegroup."

Old XP pc: "Get stuffed, matey. We don't know diddley-squat about Homegroups. What's wrong with good old Workgroups?"

Win 7 pc: "Oh, my... listen to the ol' banjo-playing wierdo. Get with the now, buddy. Workgroups are like, soooo twentieth-century. Homegroups. Get used to it. Oh, and would all the mouth-breathers kindly leave the information highway?"

Old XP pc: "Don't like your attitude, sonny. When you've earned your third service pack, then we might listen. Until then, you're the newbie on the block and it's gonna be WORKGROUPS DO YOU HEAR ME????"

At this point I had to step in, and give both machines a good slap upside the TCP/IP... several hours later, I'd managed to get them at least politely acknowledging each other's existence, and even grudgingly swapping a few files. We still need to talk about the printer, though.

So little real progress today. I really must get on with exploring the possible presence of aliens among our political leaders; with a general election coming up, this could be quite critical.